In my last post, commenting on Tony Blair’s moral case for war against Saddam, I accepted Blair’s claim that Saddam’s war of aggression against Iran, involving the extensive use of poison gas and the loss of hundreds of thousand of lives was an indefensible crime against humanity. But it can be defended, as witness this counterargument:

Opposition to communism and the rampant Islamic fundamentalism of the Ayatollah Khomeini might actually have required an expedient war. The real world must never intrude into Quigginland. All must be black and white, no room for shades of grey or difficult moral choices where evil will be done either way – we simply avert our eyes and ignore the evil flowing from the choice that our ideological prejudice dictates should have been taken.

OK, I cheated a bit. In the original, this was a defence of the US alliance with Saddam in the war against Iran, and had the phrase expedient alliance in place of expedient war. Still the defence works just as well for Saddam as for Reagan and Bush Sr, and the basic point is pretty clear. If you want to justify a war against Iraq don’t do as Blair did and invoke considerations of morality. Above all, don’t do as Quiggin did and try to assess what a moral case for war would really involve.

PS: In the continued absence of Haloscan, Ken and I have ratcheted up the thermostat, to make up for the absence of the redhot barbs that normally fill our comments threads. Civilised discussion will resume shortly.

Like millions of others, I went to a peace rally yesterday. There were about 50 000 people in Brisbane*. I think it’s clear that the case for an immediate war aimed at getting rid of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction has not convinced the majority of Australians. That could change, given new evidence, but it’s clearly going to take a lot more than we have seen so far.

[* Crowd estimates are always tricky. The march took about an hour to pass any given point. Assuming 15 people per second passed each point (the marchers were about 15 abreast) that would make 3600*15= 54 000.]

Faced with similar protests in Britain, Blair switched to the moral case that has been his primary motivation all along – that Saddam is an evil dictator who has caused immense suffering in a sequence of wars and that his overthrow would be a blessing. This is a strong case, but it implies a totally different approach than that adopted over the last year.

A starting point would be an admission by the US government that it actively assisted or passively encouraged Saddam in the commission of his worst single crime – the war of aggression he launched against Iran, in which he made extensive use of chemical weapons. When Blair correctly says that Saddam’s wars have killed more people than were marching in London, he should be remined of this. I don’t say that the past crimes of the US government mean that it should not do anything about Saddam now, but an open declaration of the US role and an apology for US complicity are necessary if the moral case against Saddam is to have any standing.

The second requirement is for some sort of just basis for asserting that a particular leader is a criminal who deserves to be overthrown. We have such a basis in the International Criminal Court, in which Britain is a participant. Blair should demand that Saddam be tried before this court. Of course, a precondition is that the US should drop its own objections.

Third, there is the problem of equal justice.The moral case against Saddam is compromised by US complicity in the occupation of Palestine. If Bush were to demand acceptance by both sides in this dispute of a peace plan similar to that put up by Clinton and back his demand by a threat of sanctions and a willingness to enforce an agreed peace, the moral case against Saddam would be lot stronger.

Finally, there is the problem of multiple agendas. A moral case for war can be made only by forgoing all attempts at seeking strategic or economic side-benefits. Yet many (most) of the US commentators supporting war are pointing to such benefits as a primary or secondary motivation. A moral case would require a clear commitment not to use Iraqi oil to the benefit of the US, not to use Iraqi territory as a base for further military action, not to make side deals with countries like Turkey etc. So far none of this has been forthcoming.

To summarise, a moral case for war requires clean hands. Arguably Blair has clean hands on this issue. Bush certainly does not.

Update Ken Parish responds, missing the point pretty thoroughly in my view. I’m not claiming that the moral case for war is the only possible one. War can be justified as a defensive response to aggression. In fact, the interpetation of international law prevailing until very recently suggested that this is the only justifiable ground for war. In this case, the considerations I’ve set out above are largely irrelevant.

A second possible case for war has arisen recently, namely that clear and direct defiance of the UN could justify military actions to enforce its resolutions. Since this case lowers the bar for war substantially, it requires convincing evidence. At the moment, the evidence hasn’t been enough to convince anyone who wasn’t already committed to war. In particular, only a handful of members of the UNSC accept it. This could change, for example, if Saddam refuses to destroy missiles, but the need for a clear case can’t be brushed aside on the basis that the US wants to fight before the weather gets too hot.

The claim that there is a moral case for war is quite different to either of the two considered previously. This claim is that war can be justified simply on the basis that the government to be overthrown is a bad one. I’m sympathetic to this claim in principle, but it’s obviously an idea that needs to be handled with extreme care. It must require more than a decision by one government that some other government ought to be overthrown. That’s why I suggested a range of considerations that would apply in this case, broadly summed up as the need for ‘clean hands’.

Ken argues that all of these conditions are totally unrealistic. I’d argue on the contrary that few of them would be particularly problematic for Blair. He’s joined the ICC, supports pressure on Israel for a peace with the Palestinians, does not appear to be seeking strategic or commercial advantage and so on.

Ken argues for a consequentialist justification of war, namely that it is justified whenever the anticipated benefits outweigh the costs. Although he covers himself with the caveat ‘That sort of exercise is not without its own difficulties when many of the consequences can’t easily be measured with precision in advance’ he doesn’t ask who is to make the judgement. The implicit answer is that the government that decides to go to war should make it. I’d suggest that, given this answer, every war in history would pass Ken’s test.

Haloscan, my commenting facility, is still out of action. The site says they ran into problems while trying to fix the server. I have a bad feeling about this, and I wish there was an easy way to save and archive my comments. However, there is some progress – comments are now readable although posting is still disabled.

For the moment, Monday Message Board is moving to manual backup. Email me your thoughts on any topic, and I’ll post them in batches as I get time.

QED by Richard Feynmann explains the basic principles behind quantum electrodynamics without any of the nasty integrals required to actually work anything out. Quantum theory has been the subject of a lot of confusion and outright mysticism starting with Heisenberg, but for anyone comfortable with probability theory there’s nothing fundamentally counterintuitive about it.

Subatomic phenomena are better described in terms of probability distributions than as miniature versions of macroscopic phenomena like waves and particles. Taking a ‘particle-like’ observation amounts to collapsing a distribution to a point mass in one dimension, leaving an uncertain distribution in another dimension. So far so good. It would be nice to actually be able to work this kind of thing out, and if I ever have a few years to spare, I’ll learn this.

I’m also converting my CD collection to MP3 files for my iPod. I want to move on the more challenging problem of my old LPs next. My turntable just died, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Tandy’s still stocks them at very reasonable prices. Anyway, if anyone has experience of converting LPs to MP3s, particularly using a Mac, they’re welcome to email me.

The comments thread has been particularly lively and informative over the past few days. So of course, Haloscan is having one of its now-routine episodes of comment-chewing. On past experience, the comments will reappear later, but comments posted in the interim (that is, now) will be lost forever.

I’ve been putting off moving to MT, despite some valuable advice and offers of help, but I won’t be able to do so much longer. Once I’ve got the main website transition completed and the backlog of files down to a manageable level, I plan to make the shift.

One thing that interests me in discussions of the UNSC is that France, China and Russia are always mentioned as having veto power. But no-one ever mentions the possibility that the US may end up vetoing a UN resolution, say, one calling for another four weeks of inspections.

In a series of recent posts, Ken Parish has attacked critics of George Bush and his Administration as “anti-American”. The targets have included the Labor Opposition, columnists like Ken Davidson, and even Americans like Maureen Dowd.

A major problem with this claim is that most though not all, critics of the Bush Administration were, and are, favorably inclined to its predecessor, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. Conversely, attacks on Bush pale into insignificance by comparison with the vitriol poured on Clinton by his domestic and foreign opponents. As an example, Ken cites a Bunyip post, which attacks Clinton, as the source for his claim that Davidson’s piece, which praises Clinton and relies primarily on American sources, is “anti-American”.

It seems as if Ken’s steadily hardening pro-war position has clouded his judgement on this one. Only a couple of months ago, Ken himself was writing

I’m not usually impressed by Maureen Dowd’s journalism. However, her New York Times piece on President Bush’s appointment of Henry Kissinger to”investigate” America’s preparedness and actions leading up to September 11 is an exception. It’s succinct, well written and compelling.  I must admit I had harboured mixed feelings about the Bush administration until now (despite Paul Krugman’s convincing demolition of the Bush tax cuts), but in my book a government that associates itself with this cynical, thoroughly evil old man has definitively characterised its own values and aspirations.

The fact is that, for many opponents of war with Iraq, including me, distrust of the current Administration is one of the main issues. I simply don’t believe that the stated motives for the war are the real ones, and therefore that the promised outcomes will actually be delivered. By stigmatising all criticism of Bush as “anti-American”, Ken is stacking the deck in favour of war.

A separate claim is that, even if criticism of the current US Administration is legitimate in general, it’s not legitimate for an Australian government or alternative government. The difficulty here is that it’s generally accepted that Howard is going to do whatever the US Administration tells him to in relation to Iraq, and that any Australian government would probably be in the same position. In these circumstances, to say that criticism of the Administration is off-limits for Australians is to accept the role of a client state. Maybe that’s realistic, but it’s also humiliating.

Ina recent post on economists opposing Bush’s tax cuts, I predicted that few free-market economists would line up to support Bush’s budget. As “Anonymous Coward”* points out, I was way off the mark. The US Treasury has just released a statement by 250 supporters, including big names like Feldstein, Boskin, Mankiw and Meltzer. Since Feldstein has in the past been a big supporter of the ‘crowding out’ hypothesis, I’ll be interested to see if he puts forward a supporting analysis.

* This is the default identity from Slashdot and elsewhere, which has been popping up a bit in my comments thread. I’m going to treat AC as one person for the moment, but who knows. It could be yet another manifestation of the many-avatared Imre-Gudgeon-Bunyip-Parish complex, in which some commentators have sought to implicate me as well.

Update I wasn’t 100 per cent wrong. As the NYT points out, there are currently 5 Nobel winners at Chicago, none of whom signed either ad.

I mostly agree with what Ross Gittins writes. But I think he’s off the mark in today’s SMH. Ross plays down concern about growing household debt, noting that it is more than offset by growth in assets. He writes

The value of all our houses accounts for more than 60 per cent ($2.1 trillion) of total assets and it’s been rising at the rate of more than 12 per cent a year. So rising house prices and strong investment in new housing account for most of the growth in our wealth.

The problem here is what’s sometimes called a fallacy of composition. Any one household can deal with a debt problem by reducing housing wealth (taking a second mortgage, or selling their house). But households collectively can’t do this, since the only potential buyers are other households.

What this means is that, far from being part of the solution to the debt problem, the increase in house prices is part of the problem. If there is a general increase in the difficulty of servicing household debt, for example arising from an increase in interest rates, individual households will respond rationally by seeking to sell their housing assets. But since households generally will be trying to do this, house prices will fall, exacerbating the original problem.

The longer house prices (more accurately, land prices) stay high, the more debt individual households will accumulate against their wealth and the worse the problem gets. In fact, having taken on a mortgage in my move to Brisbane, I’m part of the problem – you can’t beat the Zeitgeist I guess.

Quite a few pro-war bloggers, notably including Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair, have opined that bin Laden is dead and that the recent tape is therefore a fake. I think that they are probably right. But this means, obviously, that the US intelligence analysts who declared the tape genuine are misinforming us, or aren’t very competent. So presumably when Powell presents us with audio evidence, vetted by US intelligence, we should be sceptical. For example, audio evidence of Iraqi officers discussing WMDs.

As far as I can tell, if we discard the phone intercepts, nothing in Powell’s dossier of a week ago is left intact. The in-depth British analysis of Iraqi intelligence turned out to be the products of a Google search, subjected to a quick and dirty piece of spin doctoring by Blair’s in-house team. The supposedly current data was actually a decade old. The Al Ansar chemical weapons factory turned out to be an invention of their local opponents. The Al Qaeda link was evaporating until someone decided to channel bin Laden himself to back it up. The photographs of trucks were photographs of trucks.

Maybe in all of this there’s something solid. But when even Tim Blair and Glenn Reynolds think the Administration is lying, it’s hard to see why anyone else should believe them.